In this paper we analyse the importance of precautionary saving in Italy. In contrast to previous studies, we focus on two contemporaneous sources of uncertainty, income and health expenditures, to explain the presence of precautionary saving. The major changes occurred in public health care...

The aim of the paper is to shed some light on consumers' attitudes to adopting strategies to contain the cost of medication. Using micro-data from an ad hoc survey conducted in Italy and the UK, several hypotheses are tested regarding patients' decision-making behavior and how it is influenced...

In this paper, we examine the relationships between health care visits to general practitioners, public sector specialists and private sector specialists using data from Italy, which has a mixed public-private health care system. We develop a simultaneous equations model that allows for the...

The literature on the relationship between exchange rate and investment mainly focuses on the devaluation argument, which provides evidence that a devaluation may positively affect investment spending. The goal of this paper is to extend the analysis to how exchange rate variability can...

Recent improvements in population health have been possible thanks to advances in sanitation and health technology. Several treatments, procedures and diagnostic devices have revolutionized modern epidemiological patterns, turning once deadly diseases into curable or preventable conditions,...

We examine access to general practitioners, public and private specialists in Italy. We develop a novel model using finite mixtures of probit models that provides a rich and flexible functional form. The mixed distribution is flexible and can accommodate non-normality of response probabilities....

Charges for health services help contain healthcare costs. Despite showing that medicine consumption decreases when charges are increased research has not yet identified how doctors 'manage' the charge system to help patients who cannot afford treatment. This paper describes how the charge...

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy...

Throughout history, technological progress has transformed population health, but the distributional effects of these gains are unclear. New substitutes for older, more expensive health technologies can produce convergence in population health outcomes, but may also be prone to "elite capture"...